Woe unto the character known only as Sharon, played by Mimi Rogers, who stands at the center of the exceedingly strange 1991 film The Rapture. A single woman living an empty life, sometimes hedonistic, sometimes merely quietly desperate, she by all rights should not be in the least bit prepared when the endtime begins. But things happen fast for Sharon. She becomes a born-again Christian, marries, and has a child, just in time for the end of the world. God, as he will do, treats Sharon as an experiment, throwing tough tests her way that make Job‘s seem like a middle-school pop quiz. In the meanwhile, the firmament cracks open, the fires of hell lick the world, and horrible visions take very real and specific shape. Throughout, Sharon’s yearning faith doesn’t serve her well—or so she thinks. Rogers is superb in her role, as is a very young David Duchovny, pre–X Files, who plays her husband, and as is Will Patton, who for once gets to play a good guy. The film is directed by Michael Tolkin, who wrote The Player, that preeminent study of Hollywood cynicism, and yet The Rapture takes the notion of apocalypse and rapture very seriously, without dissolving into sci-fi.

Honorable mention goes to another biblically inspired film, The Prophecy, in which Viggo Mortensen—the star of the just-released post-apocalyptic film The Road—plays Lucifer, though now working against the archangel Gabriel, played with deeply scary sincerity by Christopher Walken, against the backdrop of a small town in Arizona. Whether read as literal or as a metaphor for the crisis of faith, the film works on every level—and, come to think of it, Mortensen is pretty scary himself.